Saturday, May 31, 2014

Bump what the rumors are saying about Chris Brown moving in with Rihanna because Chris Brown was recently spotted out with his ex-girlfriend, Karrueche Tran. Both were headed out to the "Agenda Trade Show" in Long Beach, California, to promote Chris Brown's "Black Pyramid" clothing line.

The funny thing about all of this is that since the public breakup between Chris Brown and Karrueche, they haven't allowed the media to take pictures of them together. However, the paparazzi have taken some sneak snaps of the two just when they thought no one was looking (as shown in the photo above).

Now, you can check out some more photos from the event when you click on that "Read More" button below:

Peep Karrueche in the background

And just so you guys know, Karrueche is officially Chris Brown's stylist and she is assisting him with his "Black Pyramid" line as well as his "Symphonic Love Foundation". So when you really think about it, Karrueche is going to be around for the long haul regardless. #IMJUSTSAYING

R&B songstress, Jasmine Sullivan, has pretty much been M.I.A. lately. I believe the last offering we got from the R&B diva was the "Love Me Back" album which was released back in 2010. However, don't think that Jasmine Sullivan won't be returning back to her singing career because word on the internet curb is that she is working on her third album which doesn't have a title or a release date yet.

On top of working on her third album, Jasmine has also been working on herself as she was spotted looking 50 pounds lighter and 100 times happier in a new Instagram picture someone posted of her recently.

You can check out that photo courtesy of SheIsDiva.com when you click on that "Read More" button below:

Friday, May 30, 2014

Today we're bringing you a tutorial you've been asking for over the last several months. We read all of your emails and we heard the request! We partnered with our favorite magical fountain of youth, Restorsea. As you may know, we've become a little obsessed. We love a good 2-in-1. Restorsea exfoliates as well as moisturizes so you get a youthful healthy glow that you can't necessarily get with just a regular moisturizer. If you have a favorite already, you can definitely use that for this tutorial because the steps would be the same. If you want to check out Restorsea for yourself you can find their Starter Kit here. Use "startkit" to basically get the eye cream for free. Okay, here we go!

TOOLS:

Day time moisturizer, eye cream, clean hands, mirror.

STEPS:

1.After shower or cleansing, start with an analysis by looking closely and touching your skin. Do some areas feel drier or more tout than others? Is there more redness, irritation or flakiness around your nose or chin? Remember, you don't have to treat your entire face the same way.

2.Start by warming up a quarter-sized dollop in between your fingers. This step is really important to activate the ingredients with the heat of your body temperature so it melts into your skin more.

3.Target the driest areas with the most amount of cream by applying it directly to the area with your fingertips in patting and swirling motions.

4.Now that we've given extra TLC to those areas, we can take care of the whole face and neck. Warm up more cream between your fingers and start with your cheeks using upward patting and sweeping motions. You want to gently massage but never pull your skin or use downward motions.

5.Continue with circular motions across the forehead.

6.Finish with upward strokes all over the neck and don't forget your chest! If you're a side sleeper, the creases you wake up with in the morning down your chest will eventually become wrinkles if you don't treat that area too!

7.For the delicate eye area, we switch to an ultra-concentrated eye cream because the skin around our eyes is thinner and battling a lot of movement from smiling and squinting. With your ring finger (the least strong finger on your hand), dip into the cream.

8.Gently tap the cream about a half-inch below the eyes, starting at the inner corners and working your way across just outside of the outer corner. Eye cream travels so you shouldn't go too close to the lashline so it doesn't travel inside of your eye and cause irritation and swelling.

9.Gently massage the cream into the skin by again tapping (not rubbing) it over and over until it's soaked in. The dots in photo 9 represent the pattern we used to tap the eye cream in.

Looking for something fun and different to try this weekend? Why not add a little highlight to your cat eye by calling upon its twin counterpart! You might remember when I did this look on Lauren Conrad back on the red carpet back in 2011 from our Double Liner Story... anyway, it's much more wearable than you might think and it shows you're confidently willing to take chances! Here's how:

TOOLS:

A Black Gel Liner Pencil

A White Matte Kohl Pencil

A Light Rose Gold Powder Eye Shadow

A Gold Shimmer Cream Eye Shadow

An Angled Contour Shadow Brush

An Angled Liner Brush

A Small Smudge Brush

Your Favorite Mascara

STEPS:

Sweep the dusty opal shadow all over the lid, concentrating on the crease with the shadow brush.

Trace the white pencil along the lash line and continue up and outward toward the end of the brow like you typically draw a cat eye.

Perfect the tip of the wing with an angled liner brush by dragging the line out a millimeter longer so it's really sharp. If needed, use a Precision Q-tip to clean up any "bobbles" in the line.

Now trace the lash line with the black kohl pencil as you would a typical cat eye, copying the shape of the white liner.

Again perfect the wing tip and any bobbles with the liner brush or Q-tip. **If you want to really make it dramatic, go back over the black line with a black liquid liner.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Carrie Underwood shows how she’s adapted to her starring role as Maria von Trapp in NBC’s The Sound of Music special, as she waltzes with co-star Christian Borle (Captain von Trapp) and sings a few lines from the musical’s iconic songs, including “My Favorite Things” and the title track.

“Nobody does stuff like this for one night,” Underwood says, referring to how NBC will televise a live broadcast within studio confines when it airs December 5. This format seems like a modest nod to the musical’s Broadway roots, but the trailer also makes it feel like a daring move, considering how the 1965 film adaptation (starring Julie Andrews) made terrific use of stunning locations like the landscapes of Salzburg, Austria.

Does Underwood make for a convincing Maria von Trapp? Watch the trailer up top, then tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Lady Gaga‘s third album ARTPOP has arrived, and we’ve declared it in our own review to be “her most cohesive work to-date,” adding that it’s “here that she finally cements her ‘sound’.” Other critics find the record to be either smart, a challenge, all over the place or, in some instances, a complete mess. We’ve gathered up a sampling of what The Internet is saying about Mother Monster’s new LP below. Give it a lookover, then let us know your own thoughts on ARTPOP!

lady gaga looks frightful in London

9 Photos »

:: The Daily Beast states that “ARTPOPis not a bad album. There are smatterings of genius on it, even, though moments of great never morph into songs of greatness,” while later adding that it “is ‘art’ in every way: polarizing, indulgent, and, as is often the case, raises the question, ‘What's the point?’”

:: Buzzfeed feels the LP lives up to its title: “It remains to be seen whether or not this album will be a major commercial success on par with her previous records, but the album is proof that Gaga hasn't become out of touch with her best instincts as a pop musician. ARTPOP is interesting in that it's somehow both deeply weird and conventional at the same time.”

:: Consequence Of Sound finds the album to be faulty: “Her ostentatious style, culled from MoMA art pieces and Madonna, Brooklyn drag fashion and Bowie, no longer has the shock-and-awe power it once did, and so her equally ostentatious musical style, influenced by many of those same factors, suffers from the same problem. On ARTPOP, Gaga lacks forward momentum in the same way she did on Born This Way.”

:: USA Today is on the fence: “One can easily imagine the songs as a sturdy vehicle for her delightfully over-the-top stage shows, and in small doses, they’ll fuel the Little Monsters on the dance floor. But given the scarcity of sing-along choruses, the rhythmic pounding and the absence of nuance in her powerhouse voice, the overall effect is exhausting if you’re listening to the album all the way through. Even the lone ballad, ‘Dope’, is too much of a slog to provide much relief.”

lady gaga strips down for her 'artpop' pics

5 Photos »

:: The Backlot praises Gaga’s unwavering style, even if, in their opinion, it’s holding her back at this point: “Along with her funny and obnoxious gall, self-awareness has always separated Gaga from contemporaries like Beyonce, Rihanna, and Katy Perry, unerringly safe ciphers who've spent the past five years emerging with state-of-the-art singles and throwaway sentiments at precisely the right radio moment. As those vocalists change up their game when trends demand it, Lady Gaga is still brandishing her mic like a disco stick and demanding pop radio adapt to her… And yet, that's why her new album ARTPOPisn't as fascinating as it could be: Though the 15-track disc has triumphs and follies aplenty, they're mostly the same triumphs and follies from her previous three albums, only now they're crunching and thudding harder in ARTPOP's dizzying, somewhat unfounded aggression.”

:: Says Metro, “Gaga remains a pop icon who prompts frequent comparisons to other names; the same was arguably never true of Madonna. The Euro riffs of ‘Venus’ recall 1990s camp connoisseurs Army Of Lovers; the couture-grotesque of ‘Donatella’ feels like an arch retread of Bowie or RuPaul; the 'don't want your money, want your love' refrain of ‘Jewels N' Drugs’ even weirdly evokes Transvision Vamp. Sometimes, you suspect the same fabulous effect could be achieved with a lot less money.”

:: The Chicago Tribune is also lukewarm on ARTPOP: “For all that firepower, the music is catchy but tame - she’s cozying up to chart-topping formulas rather than disrupting them. The flamenco guitar and noir-movie atmospherics of ‘Aura,’ the anthemic Meat Loaf-isms of ‘Gypsy,’ the Philly soul of ‘Fashion!’ and the jittery synths of ‘Applause’ offer glimpses of the stylistic sprawl Gaga had in mind. But there’s way too much that doesn’t move the dial beyond its well-defined box…”

:: SPIN notes, “‘Applause,’ the charging, atonal ode to being onstage and basking in her fans’ adulation, closes out this sprawling, seemingly flawed-out-of-necessity record. As a final statement, ‘Love me, because I love you’ certainly transcends both art and pop; she remains singularly compelling and lovable as a celebrity, even if her records don’t always match up to her outsized persona. Even at their worst, they only prove that the art is sometimes unworthy of the artist.”

:: Finally, Muumuse sums it all up with this: “In a year when Lady Gaga's fellow heavyweights didn't really seem to try very much at all - when Beyonc inked a $50 million deal with Pepsi to go on a tour to promote nothing in particular and tease snippets of songs in H&M commercials that no one can buy on iTunes, when Britney landed in a helicopter in the middle of the desert for no reason to announce a Vegas residency that she may or may not even want to do, and when Katy Perry released an inoffensive collection of Teenage Dream B-sides for 14-year-olds - pop music's greatest try-hard gave us the year's most fabulously over-the-top shitshow that absolutely deserves your applause.”

Let us know your own thoughts on ARTPOP below, and get an eyeful of even more pop music coverage, from artist interviews to exclusive performances, on Idolator's YouTube channel.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Heidi Klum went as an old lady for Halloween this year, and, as always expected from the supermodel, it was beyond epic.

We bet you've never seen an old person costume as committed as this. Short of rolling around in a wheelchair, Heidi had an Oscar-winning makeup team give her wrinkles, crow's feet, turkey neck, liver spots, bulging veins - the works.

Heidi Klum dressed up as an old woman for her 14th annual Halloween party in New York City on October 31, 2013

Wow pic.twitter.com/ae2Il39yrq

- Heidi Klum (@heidiklum) November 1, 2013

Heidi Klum's Halloween costume was so amazingly detailed, we had a difficult time distinguishing which parts were makeup/latex and which parts were really her. We can be sure, though, that those legs in the twitpic above are 100% makeup. Just the other day, Heidi showed up at a football practice in ripped jeans that showed that her actual knees are still pretty perfect.

No saggy knees or spidery varicose veins yet for Heidi Klum!

Heidi Klum at a football practice in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California on November 2, 2013

We asked you before if you would wear jeans with the knees blown out, but perhaps what we should be asking is if you would buy jeans with the knees pre-ripped for you. It's like taking the fun out of wearing out a beloved pair of jeans! But if paying the premium is no big deal for you, check out our top picks for showing off smooth, youthful knees below.

Tired of your usual jeans get-up but can't seem to let go of comfortable clothes? There's an influx of trendy printed pants for you to experiment on. Wear some of the most current prints like tartan and geometric and you'll never run out of chic style.

So temporarily relinquish your jeans and have a go with these covetable printed pants:

1. Kenzo Eye Print Lambskin Trouser, $1459.66

Halloween is over but that shouldn't stop you from adding a few quirky (and spooky!) touches to your ensemble. We have this eye-printed pair of trousers in mind. Thanks to Kenzo, the eye print is becoming popular as of late.

2. Michael Kors Jacquard Dogtooth Pattern Trouser, $895.00

First, the color is so striking, it won't be difficult to look gorgeous in it. Second, that large houndstooth print screams preppy vibes. So if you are wearing this, go that route and wear it with a collared top.

3. Issey Miyake Striped Trouser, $580.00

Plaid? Patched? You can use both to describe the print. This pair of trousers is easily one of the most versatile ones we have seen as of late. You can wear it with solid-colored tops or experiment on a print-on-print look.

4. Fausto Puglisi Tartan Print Trouser, $1840.30

Ah, yes, the tartan print. The must-have print of the season. You definitely can't go wrong with this one. Wear it with an oversized trench coat and sweater. Cap off the look with high top sneakers.

5. Marc by Marc Jacobs Etta Print Pants, $378.00

Fancy something geometric in your wardrobe? Go for this pair of pants. The cropped silhouette opens up doors for preppy styling, which is a big hit for autumn and winter.

6. Rag & Bone/JEAN Plaid Portobello Pants, $264.00

The gingham print obsession last summer is still alive this autumn. But tone down on the colors and try something with a muted color palette like this pair.

7. Tibi Slim Zebra Pants, $395.00

Fancy wearing an outfit inspired by the jungle? Go for something as tasteful as this zebra-printed pair of pants. This would definitely make an all-black outfit look more stylish.

So what do you guys think? Are you saying yes to printed pants this autumn?

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Just for fun, let's talk about fantasy vacations! Which of these four romantic getaways would you choose, if you could hop on a plane tonight? Above is San Francisco, where you could take a sail underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, hike along the coast and wear lace briefs to bed.

Or you could whisk away to Paris and spend the day strolling down the cobblestone streets and the evening drinking ros wine along the Seine. At night, you could head to one of these beautiful apartments and slip into a sexy black chemise.

You could fly to the gorgeous seaside village of Positano (we actually went here on our honeymoon!), and swim in the Mediterranean, eat fresh fish with lemon and wear a white robe by the pool.

Or you could venture to Kenya's Giraffe Manor, with 1930's decor and friendly giraffes who will peek into your bedroom window! You could wear a boyfriend sleepshirt to stay cozy in the cool evenings.

Which suits your personality best? Happy update: Eberjey is offering 20% off with the code CUPOFJO through this Sunday.

Stationery is beautiful but can get expensive. So what about making your own? This etsy shop sells rubber stamps of your favorite state or city, which you could stamp on plain notecards (50 for $6). Voila, you're set for years. (The ampersand, below, would also make a cute wedding gift.)

Monday, May 26, 2014

That's what today was. Everything and everyone was conspiring against me with slowness, disorganization, or just plain stupidity, and I found it really hard to get anything done. Well, I did manage to get something done, and listed a few of the new goodies in my Etsy shop. You can click that there link to visit, or click my Etsy Mini over there in the righthand margin (which also shows you the latest items in the shop, handy!) --->.

I had strawberries and Swedish cream for dessert tonight (from this Mark Bittman Bitten post), which helped a little. Because isn't anything Swedish always better than anything not-Swedish?

But I also plan to end my evening with a smile by viewing the wonderful Flickr photostream of * Eartha Kitsch *. She has an amazing home, style, and sense of humor. Her home definitely fulfills that Twin Peaks/cabin-y/lodge-y/1950s thing that I love so much. Go check it out--you won't be sorry!And now on to the new goods! Here are photos of blouses and dresses coming to the Etsy shop this week. First, this 1960s linen wiggle dress by Alison Ayres:

But first I want to share with you my latest favorited Etsy item, from meekssandygirl's shop. She makes gorgeous crocheted cashmere necklaces, corsages, and sculpture. I found her when one of her necklaces was featured on the Etsy front page this afternoon. I just love the colors in this lemon necklace:

Isn't it lovely? I want it! It's one of the simpler pieces. She also has beautiful, intricate poppy and bluebell necklaces. Go check out her shop!

And without further ado, Hat Preview! This 1960s peridot or pistachio green raffia bucket hat is already in the shop: